This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“Keep men out of women’s sports!” is the latest rallying cry of the terminally unreconstructed. It’s right up there with “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack” and “Juden verboten”.
Firstly, let’s debunk the urban myth at the heart of this controversy. No man has ever competed in women’s sports. Being a woman is all about identity, which means that anyone who participates in the female category is, by definition, a woman. In fact, the most rapid and efficient method of transitioning to female is to join a netball team.
We keep hearing that “men run faster than women” or that “men are stronger than women”, but science has conclusively proven that this is not the case. And by “science”, I mean the kind that produces the answers I want to hear, not the kind that obsessively bangs on about “empiricism” and “facts”.
For instance, some bigots like to cite studies that show that the upper body strength of the average man is 90 per cent higher than that of a woman. But this is because girls are socialised to believe that they can’t lift heavy things. As a result, many of them fail to build up the equivalent muscle mass.
Biological sex, like race, is a social construct invented by white men
Indeed, all of the so-called “physical advantages” accrued during male puberty — such as increased height, bone density, heart and lung size, length of limbs, and so on — can be explained by sexist parenting. Little boys are routinely taught to “man up”, to “stop crying” and to “grow bigger lungs”. It’s inevitable that they feel pressurised to do so.
In any case, there are literally no differences between the sexes. Biological sex, like race, is a social construct. It was invented by white men to uphold the hegemony of other white men. This is in spite of the fact that white men are socially constructed and therefore don’t exist.
When it comes to sports, the truth is that cis women are just jealous that trans women tend to win all the medals. Maybe they’re just better women?
